Nevada athletic director Cary Groth was headed to a staff meeting about the scorching-hot issue of NCAA recruiting deregulation when she received a phone call about the climate of discontent that has been swirling within college athletics.
Groth, a veteran of more than 30 years in athletic administration, is retiring in June. Just 56, Groth started thinking seriously last year about needing a break and going out on her own terms, especially at an age where she can still be active and enjoy time with her parents. But something else weighed on Groth, she admitted in a phone interview this week while assessing a wide range of topics in college athletics.
“What I’ve found is philosophically, I’m changing,” she said. “The business is different today than it was when I started, and that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s just not as much fun as it was.”
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At issue for Groth, along with many of her colleagues around the country, is the growing disconnect between an NCAA run by college presidents and subcommittees and the athletic departments that get little input into the process but have to deal with the fallout.
Recruiting deregulation is just the latest example. In January, the NCAA Div. 1 Board of Directors – a group of 18 college presidents – approved a package of 25 reforms to streamline the rulebook, taking restrictions off things like text messages and printed recruiting materials. The idea – and practically everyone agrees it’s a worthy one – is to stop regulating things that are, more or less, impossible to regulate.
The reform package wasn’t exactly a secret. NCAA President Mark Emmert made it one of the biggest agenda items of his tenure in 2011 following a presidential summit, and a working group of presidents made its official rule change recommendations in December – a full month before the Board of Directors voted on them at the NCAA convention.
“As we all collectively talked it through, the whole athletic community, it started to become something that seemed very common sensical,” Emmert said moments after the package passed.
Uh, not so fast. Almost as soon as the rule changes were passed and set for implementation in August 2013, several coaches around the country began to complain about certain aspects. Athletic directors started to fret about the impact on their budgets. College athletics is, after all, nothing if not a culture of copycats and irrational fears. So if Alabama wanted to hire an entire personnel department to work on recruiting – something that would be allowed under the deregulation package – others would be afraid of losing ground if they didn’t. If Ole Miss wanted to send personalized Fatheads to recruits, the rest of the SEC would follow suit. A backlash began to form.
After their league meetings in February, Big Ten football coaches and athletic directors released a joint statement expressing “serious concerns” about the deregulation package. Other leagues have not formally commented, but there’s a growing sense that enough Div. 1 schools would get on board by next month to override parts of the legislation.
“I’ve got a pretty good feeling that a lot of things are just going to be put on hold because of the amount of schools that just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Georgia football coach Mark Richt told reporters this week.
David Berst, the NCAA vice president for Div. 1 governance, told USA TODAY Sports the national office is assessing feedback to the various proposals and the working group will likely recommend some adjustments before the next Board of Directors meeting in early May.
“We’re reaching out to talk to folks to see what they’re thinking,” Berst said Thursday. “If there’s that concern, we want to preempt the override. Whether you have some number of overrides or just people talking to us, we’re going to end up at the next board meeting trying to assess that information and probably modify the legislation accordingly. So if there’s a discomfort related to personnel or recruiting materials, I expect we’ll probably try to adjust.”
If schools voted to override most or all of the Board of Directors proposals, it would be the second time they’ve shot down a major piece of Emmert’s reform agenda. Last year, the NCAA passed a $2,000 athlete stipend for so-called “full cost of attendance,” one of the more progressive steps the organization has taken. But that idea went nowhere fast, mostly on the votes of non-BCS and non-football schools with smaller budgets. Emmert last month called it a “failure to launch” and said the national office didn’t communicate as effectively on the issue as it should have. A new plan is set to be unveiled in April.
It appears the NCAA may be headed down the same path on deregulation, where the criticism isn’t nearly as split along BCS/non-BCS lines. But overriding significant parts of the package would be considered a massive rebuke of Emmert’s agenda and – once again – a communication breakdown would be to blame.
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How does a group of presidents spanning all kinds of leagues pass legislation only to get this much pushback from coaches and athletic directors? As Groth explained, the climate of today’s NCAA and the legislative bureaucracy is no longer in tune with people on the ground because they really aren’t very involved.
“It’s a totally different process today than 15 years ago, and what it’s caused is for many people to be disengaged with determining the rules and regulations of the association,” she said. “I’ve heard that from many of my colleagues. There’s a huge disconnect. We’re not often in the loop. Before, you were engaged in those discussions for your program.”
That disconnect is a byproduct, some say, of the NCAA eliminating its “one school, one vote” governance structure in 1997. Prior to that, every piece of NCAA legislation would come up at the annual convention with all 300-plus schools represented, usually by an athletic director and president who understood what they were voting on.
“It was painful, it was slow and it was laborious but it gave everybody a chance to listen and debate,” Mid-American Conference commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said. “We’ve lost a sense of community because we don’t have that. It’s done through representatives so it’s hard to get information, hard to engage people. We lost something when we went away from that. It’s hard to have a national dialogue and talk about the big issues.”
Mid-American Conference commissioner Dr. Jon Steinbrecher, shown after Northern Illinois’ victory in the MAC football championship game, laments a growing disconnect that has developed in the NCAA legistlative process.(Photo: Dave Reginek, Getty Images)
Berst said the NCAA wishes it could ensure that every detail of what’s being voted on is widely understood by the membership, but that wasn’t the case even under the old governance structure. He characterized going back to the old system as a “grass is always greener” notion with little national support.
“The membership at the time thought it was much more appropriate to come together with a representative group to make these decisions on behalf of conferences,” he said.
What concerns Groth, however, is the lack of significant debate before major decisions are implemented, to the point where athletic directors typically don’t have coherent conversations about potential reforms, even informally.
“People were able to come together, network and make a decision for the good of the association,” she said. “You got to make an educated vote and everybody abided by (the outcome). At (FBS) we have an executive director (in the national office) who sends out information about overrides and things like that, but there’s not the engagement with your colleagues. It’s just not the same.”
And neither is the perception of the NCAA, which is facing a much more explosive crisis at the moment in light of improprieties discovered during its investigation into the University of Miami. Recruiting deregulation and an override vote isn’t as sexy of a story, but it does add another layer to the notion that athletic departments are growing further apart from the goals of the national office and the handful of college presidents making decisions.
Groth isn’t sure which way the override will go, but in three months, she won’t have to worry about those headaches anymore.
“I’ve been really blessed to work for two very good institutions,” she said, with Northern Illinois being the other. “But I just don’t have that interest anymore. I want to stay in it as a fan, might dabble in something if I can help other schools or younger people in this business. But I want to have myself back a little bit.”
